World magazine recently highlighted the impressive impact of the community outreach of one urban congregation in Manhattan. This inspiring story is just one example of the uniquely powerful effectiveness of indigenous faith-based service in neighborhoods burdened by enormous financial and societal problems. At a time of cutbacks in government services, the faith community remains as a longstanding bulwark of support and outreach to those who are in need. As research throughout the last decade has shown, religious practice has been linked to a greater likelihood of charitable outreach. Church attendance …
The data is in, and it is now widely recognized that an intact family structure is closely linked to household’s economic well-being and its ability to rise from dependency. Decades of research also provides evidence that children of married couples tend to fare better across a spectrum of measures, including academic performance, behavior, substance abuse, and psychological/emotional well-being. What may not be so well known is the fact that the ripple effects of family dissolution go beyond the impact on the immediate children of broken marriages. Current trends toward dissolving …
Shortly after the establishment of a federal holiday honoring the life of Martin Luther King, Jr., in 1986, Kimi Gray was among the first to urge that he be honored by celebrating a “day on” rather than a day off. She felt that a day aptly commemorating Dr. King’s legacy would be one in which all the engines of community investment and service are moving with full force. At that time, Kimi was a young single mother with five children living in D.C.’s Kenilworth-Parkside public housing projects. She took Dr. …
Throughout 2010, a series of studies and surveys did not bode well for the prospects of marriage and the family in America. First came a report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention showing that unwed childbearing has reached an all-time high. Currently, four out of 10 babies are born out of wedlock in the general population (five out of 10 among Hispanics, and seven out of 10 among blacks). Then came results from a collaborative Pew/Time magazine survey reporting that four in 10 respondents said that marriage is …
“What’s needed most right now is creating the conditions where assistance is no longer needed.” “Let’s move beyond the old, narrow debate over how much money we’re spending [on anti-poverty programs] and let’s instead focus on results—whether we’re actually making improvements in people’s lives.” Those quotes would certainly resonate with proponents of reform to America’s welfare system—a massive labyrinth of 70 different programs whose rolls of dependents have increased steadily throughout the past 50 years, even as they have failed to boost a small percentage of impoverished families to self-sufficiency.
Would the discovery that, every day, nearly 6 million youths in America are immersed in abusive environments create a shock wave and a call to action? That is, in essence, the finding of a report recently released by the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse (CASA) at Columbia University: The public outcry remains to be heard. The results of two concurrent surveys, each of 1,000 students aged 12 through 17, revealed that 27 percent of those in public schools reported that their schools were infected with both gangs and …
The recent release of the Census report on an upsurge of the number of Americans in poverty will almost surely be used to justify a spike in funding for federal anti-poverty programs. Yet after decades of increased spending on failed government anti-poverty programs, why should we expect a different result with the next funding increase? Since 2008, food stamp rolls have risen by nearly 50 percent to more than 40 million, and the number of welfare recipients rose to 4.4 million, an 18 percent increase. In fact, government expenditure for …
With the recently released numbers regarding poverty levels in America, public concern is heightened, in particular, regarding the plight of America’s impoverished children. This concern should generate a focus on what might empower them to rise up from poverty—and, in turn, what factors promote stable marriages. Research clearly indicates that one of the most important factors in a child’s welfare is whether she is born to married parents. Children raised by single parents are seven times more likely to live in poverty than peers in families with two married parents. …
A recent comment by actress Jennifer Aniston that “women are more and more realizing that they don’t have to settle with a man just to have that child” might seem to indicate that deviancy has irrevocably been “defined down” and that a culture of permissiveness has been permanently entrenched in our nation’s society. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report that the percentage of teens who believe that it’s okay for an unmarried female to have a child has increased to nearly 64 percent (among males) and to more …
Belying the image of the “liberated” working mother, a recent National Review Online commentary cites research by Brad Wilcox, director of the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia, showing that, for the vast majority married moms, the workplace is not the top choice of where they want to spend their days. In reviewing data from the 2000 National Survey of Marriage and Family Life, Wilcox found that only 18 percent of married women with children said they would prefer to work full-time, in contrast to 46 percent who …
